In the city where we live, life happens so fast. There’s hardly time to pause and remember even one’s own name. A month passes by like a silent wind, impossible to clutch and account for what one did with them.
You’re neighbour’s with strangers for years and friends with people far far away.
But here in this hinterland, time is constantly on rewind when it’s exhausted. The people here are never in a hurry and one looks odd for being time-conscious.
Amazing how one part of the world could give a false impression of the rest of the world.
But this silence, this heat and this solitude, it forces one to think. About so many things.
This hurrying, this rising and falling, this haste, where is all headed? To one little hole in the ground? Why the haste? And what difference does it make if one lived a sore loser or a winner? After all, the hole in the earth doesn’t get bigger or cooler for the winners. Heard of someone who made a shade for their grave. Absurd thing!
But the quietness of this place seems like a silent message that can be easily missed: the need to slow down and savor every piece of this life, travel and discover cultures and languages and ways of life different from those of where one grew up.
What a shame to be handed a great book of adventures and untold stories and all one does is stare at the cover page, too lazy to flip pages and see wonders.
One part of the world is racing towards new heights of technological evolution whereas another part is untainted by contacts with cultures outside of it, cherishing and preferring primitive ways to modern ways… And yet both worlds have things to teach each other.
But traveling, it comes at a great cost. Rooted, a tree grows bigger, has old neighbors for warmth and the bond with the soil and the birds that wanton in its leaves is deep. But the migratory bird risks losing old contacts, having shallow friends and many old places to miss.
In exchange for new discoveries and a chance to tap into different thinkings in different places to reinvent oneself, one must give up so much. But perhaps, some balance can be struck.
The land, its waters, its people and cultures have a lot to teach us, but we must be willing to give up some level of comfort in exchange for insights into other ways of life different from ours.
Mowabites Worldwide 